It's barely believable that twenty years have passed since (What's The Story) Morning Glory was released. It's also funny how memory plays tricks on you. If someone had asked me, I would have argued til the cows come home that it was a warm Summer day when I stood in a queue in the now defunct Selectadisc in Nottingham (where, incidentally, every other person was buying the same album) in anticipation of my new purchase. Maybe it was the "summertime's in bloom" line in Don't Look Back In Anger that did it. But what is undeniable is that the whole mood of Morning Glory is bound up in my kind with sunshine, optimism and a positive sense of contemporary Britain and it's immediate future.

It takes years - perhaps decades - for an album to attain seminal status. There have been a few since the mid nineties (Up The Bracket, Is This It and Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not are three that come to mind). Morning Glory is definitely in that category. The sheer timelessness of the songwriting and delivery, together with the cover photography, taken in Berwick Street at a moment that was unmistakably "now" (with another Selectadisc in the background) featuring style that had its roots in the sixties but which had been updated to be totally of its time.

Back in '95, the whole album seemed to shed the weight of recent recession- laden collective depression and point towards a bright, optimistic future. More than anything, looking back it pinpoints a moment in recent British history where the party was new and anything seemed possible. Some of those dreams we had as children came to fruition, others could only Fade Away (John Harris' The Last Party is an insightful history of Britpop and it's legacy) but, in a sense, that doesn't matter. After twenty years Morning Glory still sounds fantastic, as alive as ever, a blast of hard-edged, adrenalin - laden sunshine in a world of increasing uncertainty.

Favourite tune? There are many to choose from but, for me, it's a toss up between Some Might Say and Don't Look Back In Anger. The latter edges it on penalties.

About Me

Lifelong modernist, hedonist and dreamer. Until recently, also co-ran indie-mod site sohostrut.
Into music, films, books. Kerouac to Sartre to Godard. With a little rhythm and soul thrown in on the way.